AI can parse every database on Earth but can't answer 'Is it raining outside right now?' — a look at why physical-world perception is AI's biggest blind spot

Interesting piece from an infrastructure company that's working on what they call AI's "physical world blindness." Key insight: there are 1B+ cameras deployed globally, and vision AI costs dropped 100x in 2 years. The infrastructure to give AI real-time physical perception already exists - but nobody's built the intelligence layer yet. Their approach: Visual Question Answering (VQA) - point any camera at anything, ask a question in plain English ("Is the parking lot full?" "Are workers wearing hard hats?"), get a structured real-time answer.